Shaping Idealisms consists of eleven articles published earlier and three unpublished articles, a general introduction and a conclusion. The articles are mostly about Middle English romances and... Show moreShaping Idealisms consists of eleven articles published earlier and three unpublished articles, a general introduction and a conclusion. The articles are mostly about Middle English romances and nineteenth- and twentieth-century romance-related texts. The general theme is the tension between conventional hegemonic idealism and embedded criticism of that. The approach is an application of modern critical theories to medieval texts and modern related texts in order to analyse their subtextual premisses preliminary to other types of analysis. The texts have been treated as autonomous for the occasion. The main themes are: the difference between romance and allegory (symbolism); __dialogic texts__ and the agendas of clerkly and minstrel authors (formalism); linear, cyclic and concentric narrative structures (structuralism); characters as __actants__, and the symbolism of settings (narratology); and __diff_rance__, and 'the other' as antitype (poststructuralism). For the nineteenth-century texts the emphasis lies on medieval stories in new cultural contexts and on the perspective of hindsight (Tennyson, William Morris); for the twentieth-century texts on fantasy and the development of romance in modern times (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Lodge). Show less
